Chapter 37
I throw open the door beside reception and sprint toward the endless screams. The sound cuts through the silence of the hall like a blade.
In the farthest office, Dara is keeled over beside her desk, dry heaving. The choking gasps soon stop her cries. Xander crouches beside her, squeezing her hand and rubbing small circles on her back.
The receptionist rushes in behind me. “Dara!” she shouts. “Have you fallen?”
She steps through Xander to reach her and he bursts apart. A cloud of purple-tinged dust explodes around the office. The particles of his body swirl in the dim light.
A wave of vomit rises in my throat as pieces of his face, arms, and legs scatter into the air, hovering above Dara’s head. I swallow it down before it escapes across the office.
The sight of someone popping like a water balloon is something I will never get used to.
“This boy,” Dara wails, clutching her chest. “Who is he?”
The receptionist lifts Dara to her feet. “Are you talking about the boy who just came in?” she asks. “He’s a new client. I can ask him to leave if you’d like.”
Xander re-forms beside me. He shakes it off like a dog after a bath.
“She can see me,” he says coolly. “She’s one of us.”
Dara’s breath stutters. She looks up at me, eyes wide and unblinking.
I wave.
“Two boys can see me!” she yells, then throws her head back. Her knees buckle and she nearly crumbles to the floor again. Her limbs go slack in the receptionist’s arms like a rag doll.
I lower my hand, wincing.
“Oh, for the love of Christ,” the receptionist moans. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”
After several panicked minutes, Dara finally comes to terms with the fact that we can see her.
Two boys can see her for the first time in years.
Her breath evens, and her tears dry up. She waves the receptionist away and asks for privacy.
The woman agrees, with reluctance, questioning Dara’s lucidness on the way out as she repeatedly tries to convince her there’s only one boy in the center of this room.
When the office door clicks closed, Dara lunges at us.
She wraps her arms tightly around our necks, knocking our heads together. I stumble, catching a whiff of musty couch fabric in her hair.
She pulls back, giving me a clear sight of her hollow eyes, with the type of half-closed eyelids that make her look tired even in shock.
Her clothes are all black, her skin pale like mine, and her face frozen in time.
It’s identical to the pictures I saw online, unchanged after so many years, stuck in its early twenties.
“I can’t believe this,” she says, wiping dried tears from her cheeks.
Her voice is raspy, unfitting of someone this young.
“How did you find me? How can you see me? I have so many questions. All these years . . . boys, men . . . they haven’t been able to see me.
I thought I’d lost my mind.” Her head falls into her hands.
“You haven’t,” Xander says. “I know exactly how you feel. Everyone lost their ability to see me in 2015. I didn’t understand what was happening. I thought I was dead.”
“You poor thing.” Her voice breaks. She pulls Xander into another tight hug.
Their bodies deflate, sharing an exhaustion only they can understand.
“I was a college student in 2017 when it happened. Everyone says your late twenties are better than your early twenties. Well, I’m stuck at twenty-one years old and feel like I might as well be in hell. ”
She turns to me. “How long has it been for you?”
My throat tightens. All those years of confusion for them. They’ve been stuck like this for so long. My few short weeks of being invisible to Murray are laughable in comparison.
I swallow. “Since last month,” I say.
She blinks.
“That’s what started this whole thing,” Xander says. “He found me at Pinehurst Swim Club. He was the first person to see me since I disappeared. We think we’ve been cursed by an old pair of Penango witches!”
The color drains from her face. “So, because we’ve all been cursed, we can see each other? The rules don’t apply to us like they do for everyone else?”
I nod. “We think it works like that.”
“We’re in this weird limbo that freezes us in time,” Xander continues. “It’s like a secret club.”
“The worst kind of club ever.” She wavers on her feet. “Hold on . . . you boys are from Penango?” Her body sways.
I reach for her before she collapses for a third time.
She raises a shaky hand. “Wait . . . wait.” She walks across the room along creaky floorboards.
“I need to sit down for this conversation. I haven’t talked about that forsaken place in a long while.
” She perches herself on a windowsill and slides open the glass.
Hot pavement air curls through the open window.
My thoughts whizz by as fast as I run the one-hundred-meter dash. Where do I start with my questioning? The pool. The tree. The boys. We came all this way. What do I want to learn?
Dara tucks her long black hair behind her ear.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Xander asks before I can. “Before boys stopped being able to see you.”
“I was at that damn pool,” she says.
Xander and I exchange a glance.
“I was a lifeguard at Pinehurst in the summer of—”
“We met your brother, Robbie,” I interrupt. “He told us that you worked at Pinehurst. That’s what led us here.”
She sniffs. “I’m sorry to hear that. He wasn’t the brother I always dreamed of, that’s for sure.” She laughs. “What else did he say about me?”
“That you ran away. And your mom lost her mind.”
She rolls her eyes. “Of course he did. And did you believe him?”
“No way. That’s why we’re here.”
“Good.” She takes a deep breath, then leans back against the frame. “My stepdad just used the whole thing as an excuse to leave my mom. She was the only one who tried to help me.”
“Where is your mom now?” Xander asks.
She shrugs. “No clue. We lost touch. My stepdad and Robbie eventually convinced her that I wasn’t real .
. . visible . . . alive . . . whatever you want to call it.
She had a nun come by the house to ‘rid my spirit.’” Dara puts her words in air quotes.
“The old woman nearly drowned me with holy water. That’s when I ran away for real. I never saw my mom again.”
“I’m so sorry,” Xander says.
“Why? You didn’t do anything.”
“It’s still sad. I know what it’s like to lose your mom.”
“Yeah, I guess both your parents can’t see you.” Dara flicks a hair from her shirt to the floor.
“My dad died before I was born,” Xander says. “So my mom has had to deal with my disappearance alone, which makes it all worse.”
Dara sighs. “Well, now I’m sorry.”
He plays with the chains around his neck. “What happened to you at the pool?”
Her fingers tighten around the windowsill.
“There was this kid . . . I remember him so clearly. Blond bowl cut. Race-car bathing suit. Blue goggles. I saw him flailing in the water all by himself, like he was drowning.” I lean forward.
She squints as she recalls the story. “So I dove in to save him.” She sighs.
The desk phone rings. My heart skips a beat. Dara doesn’t flinch. She stays fixed on the story. The screeching sound and flashing red light on the phone’s keypad tighten my neck muscles. I force a dry swallow that tastes like ash.
“But as soon as I went in for the rescue, everything hurt. That’s where my memory gets fuzzy. The kid went wild, scratching and kicking me. His hands felt like a metal rake across my skin. No one ever did that before. It was almost like he didn’t want to be helped.”
Silence thickens between us.
“Did you save him?” Xander asks.
She nods. “He was the last boy to ever see me. We made eye contact underwater. I remember him staring at me through the blue goggles. Then things went black for a little, but when I broke the surface, everything changed.” She runs her fingers along the window screen, making a melodic scratch.
“Where were you boys when it happened? The change?”
“I was at Pinehurst too,” Xander says. “Swimming. Then black. Then change.”
“But I was in the woods by the Ardor Tree when it all went black,” I say.
“So, who cursed us, then?” Dara asks.
We tell her about the witches.
“But we don’t know exactly how it works,” I continue. “Or why we’ve been cursed.”
My response is somehow funny to Dara. She laughs, then coughs as a breeze blows dust down her throat. “The Ardor Tree? I hate that thing,” she says, tapping her neck. “It should be cut down.”
“Right?” Xander asks with a smile. “I carved a heart on it filled with my name and a blank line for a future boyfriend.”
Dara straightens her back. “That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“And I destroyed my heart with my ex-boyfriend,” I say.
“Ouch.” Dara grimaces. “Sweet and sour.” She crosses her legs and bounces her foot in casual confidence.
“Do people still go there after school dances and carve their names? I never had anyone to go with. It made me feel like crap about myself.” She takes a long, deep breath.
“I wrote boys suck after graduation to stick it to them all. And I still stand by those words all these years later.”
Xander laughs. “I agree,” he says. “Even when you make it clear that you like them, they just don’t—”
“Wait,” I cut in, waving my hands through the air. “You wrote boys suck on the Ardor Tree?”
“Damn right,” Dara says.
My insides quiver as everything comes crashing into place.
Xander put no one in his heart—and no one can see him.
I destroyed Murray’s name—and now he can’t see me.
Dara defamed all boys—and they vanished from her life.
This is an equation that makes perfect sense. It all adds up.
The curse isn’t at Pinehurst. It’s on the Ardor Tree. And we invoked its powers by breaking the rules.